


For the Greater Good of You

by goldfinch



Category: In the Flesh (TV)
Genre: Gen, Medical Experimentation, Mild Gore, Minor Injuries, Self Harm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-01
Updated: 2015-01-01
Packaged: 2018-03-04 19:05:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,043
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3084005
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goldfinch/pseuds/goldfinch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes Tallah feels like she’s living in someone else’s skin. It’s not even the little things, like feathers and the warmth of someone’s hand in hers - it’s a handful of gravel and her palm in open flame; it’s standing ankle deep in a snowdrift and feeling <em>absolutely nothing</em>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	For the Greater Good of You

**Author's Note:**

> This is the second piece in [Hierarchy of Needs for the Undead](http://archiveofourown.org/series/194507), a series addressing various social issues in the world of In the Flesh.

Tallah still gets the uni newsletters. There was a big gap in issues during the Rising, and even the ones coming out now are sparse, administrative stuff and the occasional research publication, how the new cricket team spent a weekend replanting all the flowerbeds on campus. Things she cares about even less now than she did when she was properly alive. But it gave her an idea. 

Because her keycard still works too.

All the sensitive research stuff at Barts is kept behind locked doors, a lot of it underground, even, clean concrete walls and trolleys stacked with plastic mice cages. There’s an echoing stillness down here, away from the wood-paneled classrooms and conference rooms upstairs, a silence that gives way to the ting and pop of pipes if she listens, the scratchings of mice in their wood-chip nests. Her old office is at the end of the hall. She doesn’t expect it to be the same, of course, doesn’t expect answers to be laid out on the desk waiting for her, but a part of her hopes. But when she reaches it the room is dark, and the code’s been changed; her card doesn’t work here anymore. She sighs, rests her forehead against the glass to peer in. There’s a strange coat draped over her chair, a mess of papers on the desk and a textbook pushed half off the edge she doesn’t recognize. Whoever’s gotten her workspace is a fucking slob.

In her pocket, her mobile vibrates, and she fumbles it out to silent it.

_Find anything?_

It’s Adam, the boy who lives in the apartment down the hall from her. He could care less what she turns up though, Tallah knows; he isn’t interested in the mechanics of their new existence. He’s happy enough dropping his bag by her door after school and then flinging himself onto one of her bar stools, rummaging through her drawers and stealing all her pens. But he’s the only one who knows she’s here, the only one she trusted enough to tell. Because it isn’t technically illegal, what she’s doing, but neither would she ever have come in broad daylight.

 _No_ , she types, laboriously, _it’s all locked up._

A few seconds later: _Come back then. I’m already winning at Scrabble._

Tallah folds a smile back between her teeth. He’s probably cheated already as well. But that’s neither here nor there, when she’s standing in another part of the city altogether and isn’t any closer to finding answers. She’d like to run a blood test, at least, or have a go at the files in the lab’s network, but the expensive lab equipment, including the microscopes, is under actual lock and key, and she doesn’t have the time to do anything in depth anyway.

They hadn’t had to go for scans or blood work at the treatment center, or at any time since, so she doesn’t know how zombies - how _she_ is supposed to work, how she is able to move and speak when there is no breath in her lungs or warmth in her muscles. Hydrogen, Oxygen, Potassium, Sodium. She knows the precise chemical reactions that have to occur to move a single strand of muscle tissue, but she doesn’t know the answer to her own body.

The undead online assure her this is normal. _We all get it_ , one of them writes. _It’s part of the adjustment process. Coming home. Settling in. It’s going to be different because we’re different, and so are the people we left behind._ The pamphlets Tallah got from the centre say the same thing. To expect some feelings of confusion, a period of adjustment, to talk to her therapist if she feels overwhelmed. She’s supposed to be seeing a therapist. They all are, but she hasn’t told her old one she’s moved out of her mum’s, and the government isn’t organized enough yet to track her down. Adam tells her not to worry about it, that the one he’s seeing barely knows his name. But to him, being undead is a second chance.

“Hello?”

She jumps, startle response good and strong even when the rest of her brain isn’t working properly, but it’s only a young man at the end of the hall. He’s wearing dark clothing, though, and something about his tall boots or the way he’s standing - lightly, but defensively as well - makes her uneasy even before she sees the security tag on his chest.

“It’s okay,” she says as he approaches, “I work here.” Which isn’t exactly true, of course, but close enough to sound it.

It doesn’t stop him looking suspicious. “Can I see your ID please.”

Tallah reaches into her pocket, draws it out; when he reaches for it their fingers brush, and she sees the moment he realizes, the second when cool suspicion flips into alarm. “Fuck -“ But she’s already turning, her body obeying her in this, at least, when it matters. She’s lost a lot of her fine motor skills since she came back - playing piano’s a bitch; so’s writing longhand - but she can still run. Even an animal wants to survive. When everything else in her brain had been suppressed, buried under animal instinct, that had remained. She’s heard enough stories to know it’s true.

Except the guard’s caught her by the wrist, too occupied to go for his radio, too keyed-up to just let her go. He’s saying something, though. Stop. Fucking - get on the ground. He sounds like he’s done this before, like he was something else, once, and a cold slick of fear licks up her spine. No. Tallah looks back at him, his flat pale face with a soft, amphibious sort of look, barely vertebrate, as though he’s just crawled out of the ocean. No, she thinks, and pulls. It doesn’t hurt. But something in her wrist gives with a sharp crack, and her hand slips free, and then she’s running, she’s slipping on the tile and pushing herself up again, she’s leaving and she isn’t looking back.

 

 

 

 

The tube ride home is long, and quiet, the bright interior of the subway car unusually abandoned-feeling. It’s nearly three am, but her body isn’t tired. Doesn’t need much sleep, these days. She sits in the last row, hood pulled up over her hair, watching her reflection in the glass. In her lap, her left hand still looks a little weird. She messes about with the thumb a bit, figures it’s probably dislocated - it has that look. An emptiness, like something’s been pulled out of place and there’s a gap left. She might have studied medicine but that doesn’t mean she knows how to treat injuries like this, and it takes a few tries to get it in again, but after that it’s fine. Like nothing ever happened. In a way she’s lucky; worse things have happened to undead. There’s a group on reddit for weird injuries, and it’s been taken over by undead this past year or so. People who’ve fallen through windows or lost fingers chopping vegetables. One guy accidentally put a wire coat hanger through his ear, and a girl in Manchester fell asleep in a tanning bed. But every one of them, without fail, had been able to take pictures and smile for the camera.

There’s something wrong with that. But it doesn’t make her shiver.

Adam’s still there when she gets back. She’s been a few hours, but he’s just as she left him: no Scrabble board, but there’s a laptop balanced on his chest as he lies sprawled on her sofa. The rest of the apartment is dark. Tallah nearly asks if he’s not supposed to be in bed by now, but catches herself just in time. Those linguistic markers are just another barrier between them and their old lives, like moving to another country and discovering none of your jokes work anymore. She drops her bag beside his at the door, settles instead for a heatless, “Shoes. On my couch. What did your parents teach you?”

Adam’s face brightens when he looks up, and he sits forward, pulls his headphones off. “Fuck all.” He grins. He was seventeen when he died, and now he’ll always be stuck in the middle of an awkward growth spurt, his feet too big and his legs too long, untenable and strange. His whole body looks that way, ready to collapse in on itself. It’s an instability that will never even out again. And yet there’s something hungry in his eyes, in his smile, playful but sharp, like a young animal that hasn’t quite learned to use its teeth.

He swings his feet onto the table to give her room to sit, then glances at her empty hands. “No luck?” Tallah shakes her head, and he shrugs. “I did kind of tell you.”

“No, you told me not to get taken in by M16 or attacked by mutated lab rats or something. Which, cheers. Lovely image to have in my head when I was wandering through all those dark empty hallways.”

“It was a joke. I told you it was a joke.”

Still, Tallah doesn’t tell him about the security guard. Instead she looks down at her hands, at the stretch of skin where her thumb had pulled free of its socket. Adam hasn’t noticed, but why would he? Even she can’t tell anything happened. But pain, pain is one thing. There are normal human conditions that render the brain unable to process it, she knows, a disruption of the neural network, a mis-match of signals that are sent out but not received. It’s something you’re born with. It’s something wrong with your DNA. But this is something altogether different, not just pain but sensation, sleep, hunger, arousal, all the basic drives of humanity and animals and living things. And yet, here she is. Her brain is obviously working, but where is it getting its energy? Its oxygen? Why isn’t she rotting away where she sits?

She’d gone to Barts because she’d wanted answers, but every important door had been locked to her; she’ll have to try something else.

“Hey, you okay?” Adam, leaning in, eyes only brown from his contacts but still concerned. “Tallah.”

She smiles, reaches to ruffle his hair because she knows he hates it. “Yeah,” she says. “Fine.”

 

 

 

 

The newspaper accounts during the Rising are understandably muddied and confused; she doesn’t need to have been there to imagine what it must have been like. But everyone knows where the cure first came from. Halperin & Weston started in Porton Down; now they have branches in Lyon, Munich, Irvine, Baltimore, Nairobi, too many places to name - but they’ve left Porton. Their labs aren’t listed, and no one picks up at the offices except secretaries, who tell her in the same curt, rehearsed voices that they can’t help her, sorry, have a good day. She sends emails to distributors, to doctors and managers of pharmaceutical companies; she tells them who she is; she tells them she needs answers. No one answers back.

The problem with Halperin and Weston, she’s learning, is that they have a monopoly of the field in everything but name. They have the resources and the government backing to send their drugs straight to the public, so they don’t even need to publish research. They have no peers. And their website is purely commercial, with only vague gestures toward the science behind what they’re doing. She learned more at the treatment centre. There they at least went over basic neural anatomy - how neurons work, what neurotriptyline is doing to her brain. Her body has basically become a petri dish, sterile and quiet in death. She understands that. Without knowing the exact chemical makeup of the drug she can even hypothesize how it works. Neural stem cells, after all, are the only cells capable of fixing the kind of damage death does to the brain. But the rest of her body is a medical impossibility, and trying to understand it makes her head ache.

Adam gets it even less than she does. He doesn’t have her scientific background, doesn’t know how the human body works, let alone their own new, stranger biology. He’s had science classes at school but never payed much attention, and whenever Tallah tries to discuss it with him he just sort of tunes her out. She can see it in his face, a studied blankness like watching television, eyes unfocused and politely bored. She doesn’t hold it against him. Even if he were interested, he has his own problems. She’s heard him and his dad arguing some evenings, voices not particularly loud but sharp, and hard. She can hear the tone of it because there’s only a flimsy layer of drywall between their apartments. It’s quiet at night too, though. The world gets quiet, and her thoughts get loud, and it feels like she’s tying her brain in knots and every attempt to undo it only makes it worse.

When she’s finally exhausted her options, when the last email goes out and she hangs up on the last person who won’t give her a straight answer, she sits back in her chair and touches the backs of her knees, the insides of her elbows, the hollow beneath her jawbone, and there is no heartbeat, no tenderness, no pain. She’d like to do more research, but she doesn’t have the equipment - or the manpower, or the money. No one is interested in her except herself.

Tallah lets her hands drop, looks at the empty veins of her wrists.

She’ll have to make do.

 

 

 

 

She gets the instruments on Tuesday, by mail, delivered by a long-haired kid who looks her in the eye but flinches when their fingers touch. She hasn’t bothered putting on coverup in days; she hasn’t needed to go out. She appreciates this, though, her body’s accommodation to the fact that people give her dirty looks whenever they see her. Because she doesn’t need to go grocery shopping anymore, they don’t have to see her very much.

She lays a towel over a plastic bag on the floor of the bathroom, just to be safe, but the process ends up being very contained. It’s more akin to autopsy than surgery, like the thin, stiff cats she’s pinned down and cut open in anatomy class than any surgery she’s ever seen on video. There’s no blood. Hardly any fluid at all except a black, bilious mess thick enough that it doesn’t run when she carefully, carefully opens a vein. The muscles around it are pale, weathered and sour-looking, but they still work. All in all it’s fairly disappointing. She’ll have to do another area of her body next, she decides as she sews up the incision. Somewhere closer to the systemic nervous system, maybe her thigh. She’s wiping down the scalpel to put it away when her hand starts shaking.

It’s slight, at first. She sees it without actually registering it, too busy thinking about the line of stitches bisecting her useless calf muscle, which seems completely unaffected, too busy planning where she’s going to make the next cut. Right thigh? Left? How close should she get to her femoral artery? And then she’s shaking so much she drops the scalpel, with a sudden, startling clatter, on the old dinner service she’s using as a tray.

It doesn’t feel like anything. She doesn’t feel pain or tingling or anything except a white-hot shock of fear that shoves her away from the desk and into the bathroom, clawing at her blouse. But by the time she gets it up over her head the shaking’s stopped. There’s nothing to see anyway except the long white stretch of her arm, veinless and clean. She turns it over: nothing. She looks at her leg: nothing. It doesn’t make sense. She doesn’t have a circulatory system to speak of; she knows this; she’s seen it herself. And her brain is physically incapable of accepting pain signals, and thus of processing trauma. But knowing that doesn’t stop the fear. There are no physical signs of it, of course - her heart isn’t going any faster; her breathing hasn’t changed. Her peripheral and sympathetic nervous systems are cut off from her brain. But she can feel emotions, even if her biology can’t express them, and that’s something else she doesn’t understand because she knows - she knows - that they’re linked, twined together like climbing vines. You can make yourself feel afraid by breathing faster; you can make yourself feel happier by smiling. It doesn’t make any sense.

She grips the edge of the sink, breathes. She’s set herself in a maze but there’s no map to follow - or, worse, the one she has is out-of-date, and she’s only just now realizing. What if she’s done irreparable damage? What if she wakes up tomorrow unable to move her leg? She can’t even do tests to find out what was wrong, and her body is frighteningly unable to tell her, because that’s what pain is for. To let you know something’s gone wrong. That you’ve stepped on a nail, that you’ve eaten bad fish, that you’re bleeding fucking internally from unknown causes. And if she can’t feel pain - if she can’t feel -

She raises both hands to her face, presses the heels of her palms into her eyes. “Come on,” she says. “You need to calm the fuck down. You’re okay.”

And she is, is the thing. The shaking hasn’t started up again. Everything still works, and there’s no sign of lasting damage. She can start a slow playlist on her laptop, even if it takes a few tries, and she can put away the scalpel, the needle, the black surgical thread. She’s okay. She’ll wait a few days, see if anything else happens. Next time she’ll be more careful. The surgical set goes under the sink, next to the first aid kit full of gauze and plasters; all the alcohol swabs are gone but the rest of it will go to waste, now.

She breathes, though she doesn’t need to.

On her laptop the playlist loops back and starts again, the same slow songs with the same steady beats.

She goes to the kitchen afterward - old habit - but ends up in the living room, on the couch, both hands pressed to her silent heart. They’re still now, no sign of shaking; her body is mysterious again, pliant and soft over her bones. The room is quiet. There’s a yellow wash of hallway light through the curtained window, and she closes her eyes to blackness and listens, breathes. Through the wall, she can hear Adam yelling. She’s heard them at it before, but even at night, when everything else is quiet, she can’t make out exactly what they’re saying. It doesn’t make her feel better. She knows how Adam died, jumping into the water out near Dover with his mates - white chalk cliffs and the sound of the sea, the eternal note of sadness coming in - a jump he’d done a hundred times before that ended badly just that once. Tallah thinks about it sometimes, when he’s gone quiet and there’s nothing else to do; she imagines him flying, imagines him shouting with glee as he goes. Now his voice through the walls sounds cornered, and angry, and afraid. His dad always gets the last word.

 

 

 

 

She’s on edge all the rest of the night and most of the day after, but the shaking doesn’t come back. 9:00 am. 12:00 pm. 3:00 pm. She means to keep a log but there’s nothing out of the ordinary to say, and at six she bends over at the end of her bed and eases the needle into the back of her neck. The neurotriptyline hits her in a hot, prickling rush, same as always, but it seems to her it’s getting weaker, less effective. Most likely she’s building up a tolerance. The first doses of neurotriptyline at the centre had crashed through her like a sudden high tide: blackout, confusion, spiders dancing up and down her spine - now it’s more like shaking off warm water, blinking it from her eyes. When that sensation fades she won’t have anything left at all.

 _Have you felt any pain since coming back?_ she asks the undead online. _Any aching or soreness? Has anyone felt anything?_

Mostly she gets a lot of nos, a lot of sympathetic side-stepping around the very clear feeling that there must be something wrong with her if she really has to ask that question. They think she’s pitifully desperate. They feel sorry for her. No one comes out and says it but it’s there if she reads between the lines. And what’s worse is that she’s starting to feel desperate, too. Because she’ll live forever, as far as she knows, but it still feels like she’s running out of time. Before there was her research, and her friends, drinking when she felt like it and doodling in the margins of her lab notes. Now there’s nothing. Now there is the shell of her body, the only thing she can work with, the only thing left to her. Her body: the only question worth answering.

Two days later Tallah shoves aside her anxiety and lays the scalpel against her thigh, presses in, through skin and muscle, past veins, down to the bone. She uses sewing needles and bulldog clips to hold the skin back, quick and dirty fixes when her savings are growing smaller every week. She’s not down to a council flat yet, but she’ll get there soon enough. That experiment is more of the same, though: thick black fluid in her veins, in her femoral artery, withered muscles, no pain at all. Her leg looks strange and pale as the rest of her, black stitches from ankle to thigh like a corpse, like some sad Ted Burton CGI doll. She wants to be real. Wants to be alive. Her experiments are going nowhere.

She’s been scouring the web for research, even got a subscription to some of the scholarly research databases and an automatic alert set up for new articles, though there haven’t been many since she came back. And none of the ones that have were about people like her. But she keeps looking, trawling through old papers, decades-old research when they were just figuring out how the human body worked, newer experiments that talk about gene expression in terms she has to look up because she’s forgotten what they mean. When her eyes start to ache from staring at the computer screen for too long, she prints the papers out, and keeps going.

Adam slips in sometime around six that evening. It’s right round when his parents usually sit down for supper, and usually, he’d be there with them. She doesn’t ask him about it. There’s something sharp about the way he’s moves across the room, all angles, keen-limbed as some hungry predatory thing, but he flings himself down on the couch just the same. Cross his arms, doesn’t look at her. He knows she’s there, just like she knows he’s there, even though she’s got her research open in her lap, old papers on the human CNS, on spinal cord injuries, on autonomic neuropathy. This first one is nothing, she can already tell, but she has seven more abstracts to read before she’s through.

She lifts her feet up idly across his knees, and even angry, or upset, whatever he is, Adam drops a hand to her ankle, rubs his thumb back and forth over the bone in short, cut-off little sweeps. He’s only a few inches from where the stitches run straight up her calf. There was too much muscle there, she thinks, looking at her ankle, then her thigh; not enough veins and arteries, not enough going on. The leg is a boring body part. She wants to look at her kidneys, her lungs, her heart. She wants to run MRIs and CAT scans, wants to step under a heat sensor and see what parts of her go red. Sometimes she feels like she’s living in someone else’s skin. And it’s not even the little things, like feathers and the warmth of someone’s hand in hers - it’s a handful of gravel and her palm in open flame; it’s standing ankle deep in a snowdrift and feeling _absolutely nothing_. Is it like this for everyone? Is it like this for Adam?

Possible tendency to cardiac dysrhythmias. 10 mg dose of Propranolol.

“My dad wants to make me go to therapy,” Adam says suddenly. “Like, proper therapy, not these government-mandated sessions.” Tallah looks up. She’s asked before, but this is the first time he’s ever volunteered information, and she’s not sure what to say. “He thinks the videos I’ve been watching are ‘corrupting my mind.’ Fucking arsehole. Just because I don’t want to be treated like shite by half the city -” He cuts himself off, picking angrily at a hangnail. “This was supposed to be another go at things, you know? Except it - it’s just the same fucking -“ He cuts himself off again, and this time doesn’t continue. Bends over his thumbnail. Even shredded, the skin around it is just as pale and bloodless as ever.

Tallah doesn’t want to tell him it will be okay, can’t, doesn’t want to lie to him. So she watches him pick at his skin instead, watches him fall silent. Thinks of his hand on her ankle, how that, too, had felt like nothing.

 

 

 

 

The shaking comes back. And there’s a new symptom of this thing she’s probably doing to herself: nosebleeds. Black, messy ones that go on for ten, fifteen minutes at a time. Every time they happen she retreats to the bathroom, holds her head over the sink, and waits. It’s all she can do. Afterward her body returns to equilibrium, just as it had after she dislocated her thumb, after she’d flayed the skin from her bones and sewed it back together clean, like nothing ever happened.

Sodium-Potassium pumps. Action potential. Neutrons and electrons, electricity her body stopped producing the day she developed a taste for brains. She’s dead, but she’s alive, somehow, watching herself fall apart. She’s been alone too long. No one but Adam around and the delivery boy sometimes, the cacophonous voices of the faceless undead online. Uni104. Applesauce. Miketothemax. She thinks she’s going insane. There’s some soft, quivering thing inside her, like a heartbeat, but whenever she tries to touch it it skitters away under her fingers to her neck, her wrist, her ribcage, her chest. She tries to catch it but it’s like holding water; it’s there and then it isn’t, and her hands are empty and shaking.

So maybe it’s only a matter of time before her body betrays her entirely. One day the printer’s acting up, the way it always does when she doesn’t have the energy to deal with it; she’s not looking when Adam walks through the door, but she hears his voice. She finally gave him a key a couple weeks back, just in case, trying not to think about what 'just in case' meant. Her body is barely even hers anymore.

“Try taking out the ink and the putting it back in again?” Adams says, like it’s nothing but software, like it’s actually possible to start over with anything. If it didn’t work with them, why should it work here? Their bodies are as unfathomable and frustrating to her as this fucking machine. But she’s there, she kneels, and she’s crouched there jiggling the ink cartridge, hoping it connects when her vision goes. There is no sense of impending doom, like you’re supposed to get with heart attacks, no light-headedness like she’s gotten the couple of times she’s fainted. No tunnel vision, no auras, no warning, just her looking at Adam’s face, then down at the printer, and then -

“You aren’t okay, are you,” Adam asks. His face is a blur over her when she wakes, laid out on the living room floor.

“What happened?” she asks.

“You collapsed. I think it was a seizure. Tallah if -” Adam stops, looks away, seems to gather himself, like pulling snarls of yarn together in his fist, “if something’s wrong we can get you help. A hospital. A doctor.”

Tallah looks away from him, toward the ceiling. Above her there is another apartment, but above that there’s nothing but lightyears and lightyears of empty night sky, as fathomless and eternal as the mystery of life. “I didn’t want to come to them a victim.” Adam’s hand is a detached pressure on her shoulder, but she imagines she can feel it. It would be warm, a little too heavy. His palm would be dry and gentle and afraid. “I wanted to go as an equal. I don’t -“ her voice hitches; if she could cry, she would be. “I didn’t want to fail.” She turns her head to the side, to look at him, and sees a bag dropped in the entryway. It’s a big canvas bag, with leather straps and complicated-looking buckles. She doesn’t recognize it.

Her mouth feels full of cotton, stiff and dry and strange. “Are you going somewhere?”

Adam’s lips part; he looks at the bag, then back at her, then shakes his head. His hand fists itself in her shirt. She can’t feel it, but she can see it, his painted nails, the blouse that belonged to her mother.

“No,” he says. “I’m staying."

"Good."

"But… could I stay with you for a while?”

She blinks at him, surprised. Does he even have to ask? "Of course."

He smiles, then, and gives her his hand, but she doesn't take it immediately, just sits there waiting for the light-headedness that doesn’t come, will never come again. It's as though her blackout - seizure? - has cleared her mind; in the aftermath she feels numb, inside and out. Not clean, but empty. And then Adam's hand folds around hers, and she can't feel it but it's there, holding her steady; he's there, pulling her up.

“Come on,” Adam says, gesturing. “Maybe you can sit on the couch?”

It's not enough, not long term. But it's enough for now.


End file.
